


Redeeming the Tree

by kaffyr (kaffyrutsky), kaffyrutsky, rutsky (kaffyrutsky)



Series: Beijo Sonho [4]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Drama, Hurt/Comfort, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-19
Updated: 2010-11-18
Packaged: 2017-10-17 18:51:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,868
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/180092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaffyrutsky/pseuds/kaffyr, https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaffyrutsky/pseuds/kaffyrutsky, https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaffyrutsky/pseuds/rutsky
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dry and dying gardens, pain and precision; She was screaming, but would they hear?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Light Dies

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the OT3 Hurt Comfort Bingo ficathon at the **betterwiththree** community on Live Journal. The prompt was "TARDIS" and how could I resist a story telling a story of hurt and comfort with my favorite dimensionally transcendent girl crush, and my favorite TARDIS team? For those who are interested, this grew out of my drabble "Kiss to Build a Dream On" and follows that AU timeline.  
>  Many heartfelt thanks to the awesome and beloved **dr_whuh** , for his superlative editing skills.  
>  **Disclaimer:** As much as I wish it were otherwise, Dr. Who and the characters of the Whoniverse are the property of their various creators. I own nothing; they own my heart.
> 
>   
> 

The grass in Her gardens began to brown at the tips, so gradually that no one noticed at first. Flowers wilted, then disappeared before anyone could see the fallen petals.

Doors that used to open on rooms began opening on blank walls; it went uncommented upon because She sometimes decided to change a room's address in the normal run of affairs.

Hallways that should have been dry started showing spots of damp on their walls and, in chambers no one had thought to visit for months or years, fountains where water once bubbled and trilled coughed and spat out dark rust, then went dry.

Her song began to falter. All of them felt its intermittent lack in the deeps of their sleeping minds, but only the Doctor remembered when he awakened from his infrequent dreams, and only for a moment, and he put it off to his own odd sleep patterns.

He couldn't be faulted, not really. For the first time since the War, he was happy, and happiness is a remarkably effective distraction from pain. So She cried out for help, and no one heard.

  
**********************

  
The planet they visited was a marvel of machine-organic cooperation. Somewhere in the past, the descendants of Earth had created machines far greater than themselves. In the way of those things, there had been a war, and the humans had been hunted to the brink of extinction. Then – as is only sometimes the way of those things – beings on both sides asked themselves why they should fight. When they realized there was no reason, they made peace and came together. Ultimately, as years turned to centuries and millennia, they'd come together in the most intimate and physical manner.

The results were spectacularly beautiful, which had surprised Rose. "You know, this should be creepy," she said, watching the citizens around her, elegant metal and warm flesh, lights and sound flowing across faces and screened surfaces in pulsing communication that was not like any communication Rose had previously encountered. "Like the Borg, and 'You will be assimilated,' and ... you know, humans and machines just shouldn't mix, yeah?"

She thought of Daleks. So did Jack. Neither said anything. They waited until the Doctor replied, "Oh ye of little faith. You lot don't always get it wrong. This is a place where the cleverest apes in the universe figured out a new type of evolution. 'Course, this is just a side trip; the human race goes on elsewhere in its old skin and bones guise, but you didn't do too badly here." He smiled at them, his craggy face wide and open; they smiled back, relieved by unsummoned ghosts.

"There were a few worlds in my time with organo-mecha societies," Jack said. "Not like this, though. I saw some of them, and they were always ugly ... forcible grafts, caste-driven, war-based, a lot of religious or political distortions. Usually post-apocalyptic survival efforts and always insane. The Agency stayed away from them. Not that pretty at all."

"Like I said; Borg," Rose replied, holding out a hand to each man. "But I like it here. It's sort of ... I dunno, a chrome-plated fairy tale."

"Adamant and lace, huh?" Jack laughed softly, and caught at her fingers, kissing them. "Well, if the good Doctor will play tour guide we can go off and investigate the city."

In answer, the Doctor moved past the Captain, one long-fingered hand brushing proprietorially across the younger man's shoulders as he came around him to reach for Rose with the other. "Not sure about fairy tales, nor Borg, but I'm pretty sure we'll find something to keep us interested."

They walked toward the gleaming heart of the metropolis, listening to its pulse and thrum, eyes on each other. Behind them, a group of city residents walked and rolled toward the TARDIS, clustering around it like bees to an open flower. They put out hands and other appendages, brushing Her walls gently, reverently, and looked from Her to Her three charges as the trio disappeared into the lights and shadows of the city. Then they turned back to Her.

And who could blame them? She was like them and yet unlike, an amalgam of organic and non-organic life, a tantalizingly familiar alien intelligence newly arrived on their doorstep. She was all the more alluring to them because, unlike their cousins on other human worlds, these people could grasp the tiniest portion of Her communications, at least the ones built of radio and x-rays, of sub-space vibrations and light waves in the infrared and ultraviolet.

The TARDIS' admirers were young, and as sweetly, arrogantly, dangerously uninformed as the young are anywhere across the universe. They thought that what they caught in Her vibrations was the totality of Her speech – of Herself.

They were shocked at what they thought they grasped; that Her partners had left Her silent and unmoving, alone and helpless. They assumed the worst, as the young nearly always do when it comes to everything but themselves. They became determined to rescue Her, and conferred among themselves in some way particular to their civilization. Eventually, pleased with what they had decided to do, they again put out their hands, and their other appendages, and touched the TARDIS. They connected to her in ways She could not interpret as malevolent, because they weren't. Amused by their adoration, She let them past her defenses. She had no premonition of danger because She, too, was happier than She had been since the War, and less apt than She once had been to see danger approaching.

When Her coterie of new admirers dispersed perhaps two hours later, satisfied with their good deed, She was humming and vibrating in a way She had not done before. And She was terrified.

  
***************

  
"What are you doing right?" Rose asked. It was perhaps a month later, in subjective TARDIS time.

"What do you mean, what am I doing right?" The object of her query looked suitably disgruntled. "I do everything right."

"Well, you're doing it extra 'specially right, then," she said. "We've landed exactly where you said we would, when you said we would, five times in a row now."

"Oho! She's keeping score," Jack said from across the console room. He grinned, and was about to go back to his sketch pad, then stopped and cocked his head. "She's also right. Tesla Prime, 1304 Common Galactic Era, spot-on. Then back to Earth in the 26th century, again on the dot – although I still think we could have gotten a better deal on your cybernetic gewgaw in one of the Proxima colonies."

"And when you promised us blue sand and silver sun, you delivered us right to Sellei Anchora's best beach hotel," Rose continued, ticking off the next stop on their most recent itinerary. "Don't know what year."

"Present time, at least in relation to your Earth chronology," Jack offered, increasingly intrigued.

"Well there you go. And there we went. No murders, no mysteries, just relaxation." She looked faintly disappointed. "And yesterday, 1860, Naples, Italy. Finally."

"Liked Cardiff better," the Doctor muttered mutinously. "What's your point?"

"Just that one proper landing's a surprise, and two in a row is a cause for celebration," Rose said. She walked over and put her arm around the Doctor, tilting her head up to look at him. She smiled, but she also looked as if something was bothering her. "Three is, what, a national holiday? And when we get to four or five in a row ... I dunno, I guess I'm wondering what you did to make the TARDIS so un-tardy."

"Thought that one up on your own, did you?" He smiled and tapped her nose.

"I did."

"Clever girl," he said. "But you're looking a gift horse in the mouth, aren't you?"

She shook her head. "No, just wondering, is all."

The light around them flickered slightly, so faintly that they didn't notice, although Jack complained of a headache the next day.

  
****************

  
Rose joked to Jack a day later that she'd misplaced the kitchen the day before. A faint, painful hum sounded briefly in the bedroom as she said it.

"You know She occasionally rearranges things," he said as he brushed her hair.

"Yeah, but the kitchen? I don't mind running into the occasional brick wall – which I did just day before yesterday, funniest thing to open a door on – but not when I'm hungry. Oh, never mind. I had the worst headache all day yesterday, and I probably just wasn't paying attention to where I was going. Ended up in one of the garden rooms."

The door opened just as Jack thought about mentioning his own headache, and the Doctor arrived back with a tray of tea and toast. Jack smiled lazily, switched subjects and said, "Well as long as one of us can find our way to the kitchen in the morning, I'm satisfied."

  
******************

  
"I'm not gonna say 'Look what the cat dragged in –'" Rose began.

"– but look what the cat dragged in," Jack finished. They grinned at each other to hide the tiny worry that gnawed at both of them.

"That's right, laugh at the yob in the leather coat," the Doctor grumbled, rubbing the bridge of his nose with one hand and scrubbing at his scalp with the other. Jack didn't think he'd seen him looking quite so unhappily rumpled recently. "Fell asleep on the library sofa. I hate falling asleep when I don't plan to."

"From the looks of those satchels under your eyes, it didn't do you much good," Rose said, and her unease was closer to the surface now.

  
*****************

  
"I don't understand the readings She's giving me," Jack said, pulling himself up from under the console. "They're incredibly precise, but–"

"What's wrong with that?"

Jack shook his head, frustrated. "You're the one who knows Her best. Has She ever been precise? I mean, to the point of absolutely no room for error? I've been checking the spatial gyros for the past hour, and they've only gotten more and more finicky. No tolerances. A different kind of finicky."

The Doctor grinned, just a little. "You sound like Rose, but don't tell her I said that." He stopped and thought a moment. "A different kind of finicky, you say. Well, She hasn't bothered being particular for a long time, and I've always thought precision was an overrated charm ... still, not going to ignore it when the mechanic's got a bad feeling. What's botherin' you about this new found precision, Captain?"

"I don't know. I'm a tyro at this, and I know it – I wouldn't trust myself to touch the temporal gyros, even if you did – but the basics, the spatial mechanics, I'm getting a feel for, between you and Her telling me every time I make a mistake. And this is off-balance. It's not Her usual 'The readouts aren't going to move because I don't feel like it.' finicky. I'm used to that – sorry, sweetheart, but it's true," he broke off, speaking to the air around him. "This is different. It absolutely won't give a proper reading unless it's set in the precise spot the manual says it's supposed to go."

"Manual?" The Doctor looked up from where he was reading, his brows knit just the slightest. "Since when do we have a manual?"

"Since I went looking for it yesterday. It was on the jump seat. Didn't you leave it there for me?"

"Nope. Don't believe in 'em."

"Huh." Jack picked up the booklet next to him and flipped through its pages. After a moment, he put it down, almost gingerly. When he said nothing more, the Doctor put down his own book and walked over to the console, then squatted down to be closer to the younger man. "Let me look at that." He picked the manual up and performed the same page-ruffling Jack had, but at a faster pace. His brow knit further. "This is in 51st century Anglic. There are no TARDIS manuals in 51st century Anglic."

"Maybe she translated it to be nice to me," Jack said, sounding doubtful.

"She likes you, Captain, but no. She doesn't translate Gallifreyan."

Jack heard something in the Time Lord's voice that kept him from asking why. Instead he said, "So what is it?"

"Oh, it's a manual all right, but it looks as if it was written by some swot with control issues."

"Oh, hell." Jack looked stricken. "Have I done something–"

The Doctor shook his head. "No. Leastwise, I don't think so. I think I would have felt it."

Before Jack, ever the soldier, was able to ask if they should search for a TARDIS intruder and before the Doctor could answer with worried silence, Rose walked into the room, an armful of dead lilies clutched to her breast.

"Something's wrong with Her."

  
*****************

  
They walked through the halls behind Rose, who still carried the lilies.

No one said anything as they made their way to the garden room from which Rose had run. It took far longer than it should have; they opened doors three times on what Rose was sure would be their destination. Twice they found concrete and plastic walls. The third time the door opened on darkness, and none of them entered to see what the darkness held.

When they finally reached the right room, Rose hesitated momentarily before entering. Once she did, she carefully put down her liimp burden, then turned and spoke.

"It's one of my favorite rooms if I've been sick," she explained. "I haven't been able to shake this rubbish headache, not for days, so I thought I'd come here and relax. I've done it before. I usually just walk around, sit on the grass, smell the flowers, just soak it in. It does wonders. But today, I walked in and everything was ... well, look at it. It's all dead, Doctor. It's dead." She paid no attention to her own tears.

"Hell's half acre." Jack understood why she cried. The gardens that should have bloomed on both sides of the tiny stone walk leading from the door were lifeless. The room, a gymnasium-sized hall that he didn't doubt was gorgeous when things were as they should be, and which should have smelled of lilacs and peonies, reeked instead of dead plant matter. He looked closer and was shocked to realize that, while the bed to his left was as sere as if it had burned in a desert sun, the rows of dead blooms to his right were falling in on themselves like flood-damaged crops, soaked and rotted from the inside out.

"This is bad," the Doctor said. He knelt and tugged on a handful of old flower stalks on the dry side. They resisted slightly, then gave with the pull, coming up in a slight burst of dust and disintegration. "I had no idea ...."

That frightened Jack more than anything else.

  
***************

  
He snarled and threw himself away from the console, panic warring with rage in his face. Rose, who hadn't left his side for hours, flinched. Jack, coming back from the kitchen with yet another tray of tea and sandwiches, schooled his face to pleasant neutrality. He'd heard the Doctor's curse, heard some tool hit the floor grill, and knew there was nothing he could do to except soothe the situation with food and try to convince the Time Lord to take a break of some sort. He knew he would probably be unsuccessful, but he couldn't let that stop him from trying.

He walked in, shot a look at Rose that plainly said 'Hang in there,' then knelt to put the tray down on the floor beside the jump seat. "I think right about now's a good time to bring us up to speed on what you know," he said mildly.

"I don't know anything!" The Doctor had begun pacing the confines of the room, a circuit that reminded his partners of nothing so much as a cage crazy leopard.

"Then tell us what you don't know, or what you've decided can't be the problem," Jack said. "You're chewing nails and spitting tacks right now; if you don't calm down, you'll be a walking staple gun."

The Doctor snorted humorlessly. "Manglin' your metaphors there, Captain."

"Probably. I've already put sugar in your tea, but you'll have to put the milk in. The sandwiches are egg mayo, because I can't stand one more tuna sandwich, and I wanted to use the eggs before they went off. Rose, do you want one or two?"

Jack's deliberately inane chatter did what he hoped it would; the Doctor rolled his eyes, but the tension in his shoulders eased slightly. He slowed, halted, and finally walked over to the jump seat, dropping bonelessly into it. He was clearly exhausted and accepted a sandwich with wordless thanks. Rose smiled gratefully at Jack as she wolfed her own down. For the next five minutes all three concentrated on refueling.

They desperately needed it.

Rose had calmed considerably over the past few hours, even as the Doctor's composure had slipped. It was partly because she had given herself something to do, telling the Doctor she would check all the areas of the TARDIS she knew for problems. He had nodded, and suggested Jack do the same; just keep in touch with each other, and with him, by mobile and communicator, he'd said, since he couldn't guarantee the TARDIS would reliably route them back to the console room. They had done just that, hearing in each other's voices a lifeline they needed more with every step they took further into the TARDIS' interior.

By the time Jack and Rose found each other, making their separate ways back from obscure halls and deep levels, Rose had been clutching her notebook with the same intensity she'd carried the lilies. It was full of observations, taken during her tour; nearly every observation was of something disturbing. When Jack hove into sight, he was fingering his recording pad and scrolling through his own lengthy list of anomalies.

They compared notes, and their mouths grew dry at what they had found; empty rooms and broken windows opening on nothing, walls bare of paintings, rotten fruit on abandoned plates, torn lace curtains and rusted iron pipes breaking through warped walls, darkened libraries with shelf after shelf of missing books, the smell of must and decay, of rancid meat and unnameable things, shadows in the corners, a low siren wailing in the lower levels, a player-piano rattling off-key in a hallway, the echoes of something crying ... it reminded them both of dreams gone bad. Neither mentioned the impression. Together they had called the Doctor, and he had guided them back.

Now they could see each other, but they still felt lost. And so Jack brought them food in lieu of comfort, and they all partook.

  
***************

  
When they had all finished, they looked at each other. Rose sighed. "All right, Doctor. Start talking," she said.

"Don't know if anything I've got's worth saying," the Time Lord responded, clutching at his cold mug of tea with both hands. He looked at her, then at Jack, and sighed. "But you're right. We're in this together, and you should know as much as I can give you, little as it is.

"First off, my connection to Her is blocked. At first I thought She was angry about something, angry at me. We've had our differences – fights, even – and I thought perhaps She'd got the wind up for some reason. She'll block Herself from me when She's in that sort of mood. But it's worse than that. It's – no, let me start at the beginning.

"While you two were checkin' out as much of Her as you could walk, I started doin' some diagnostics. Started conservative, went with the easy system checks. I found what you did, Captain; a very efficient TARDIS, one that'll take us anywhere we want to go, when we want to go, and never get it wrong. Never." He spat it out like a curse.

"No tolerances," Jack said.

"None at all. And I'm guessin' the rooms disappearing, the gardens, Her sensory confusion – the music and voices you heard, all the odds and sods showing up or not showing up – are ... well, if She was a human I'd say it was an histaminic response, a fever."

Jack asked some more technical questions, and the conversation descended into the kind of neepery Rose didn't follow willingly. She had at least some idea of what they were talking about, having absorbed some basic understanding of tinkering vocabulary, but it was superficial at best and she rarely had helpful advice to add. Tonight she had nothing. She absently rubbed her temple; the headache was still pounding. Still, even if what she really wanted to do was flee to her room and suffer with a hot cloth and a painkiller, she knew she had to help the others solve this mystery.

"When you said She's blocking you, d'you mean you can't feel anything from Her?"

"Not a thing. Not even the slightest emotion."

Rose caught something in the way he said it. "Like a machine. You make Her sound like an ordinary machine."

The Doctor nodded, grim, and Rose frowned. "I knew it. She's felt wrong for days, maybe longer. I thought She was sick, even thought She might be giving me the headache, but I didn't know for sure 'til I saw the flowers."

He looked at her as if she'd sprouted antlers. "What?"

"Yeah. She's felt – what?"

"You feel Her?" the Doctor looked as if he was trying not to be wide-eyed. Or perhaps not to panic.

Jack wiped his mouth, put down his plate, and his eyes were very narrow. "What do you mean? Of _course_ we feel Her."

The Time Lord went still. "For how long?"

"Since the Game Station," Jack said. Rose nodded her agreement.

The three of them held their breaths, not realizing their synchronicity, or quite why they did it.

The Doctor exhaled; once, and then again. "Why didn't you tell me?"

Jack wasn't sure who the Doctor expected to answer, but Rose spoke first, and she sounded faintly incredulous at the question. "You mean back then? There? A lot was happening, Doctor, more than I could get my head around at the time. You know that."

He acknowledged her comment with a grimace. "I know, and I'm sorry. But you're tellin' me you can feel the TARDIS."

Rose rubbed her forehead and looked a little sheepish. "Well, I guess I should've said something, asked about it later. It just felt so natural, I didn't give it a second thought."

"And it happened after you came back to the station," the Doctor prompted. "How soon after?"

"Dunno. I ... I'd come back, but really, it's all a bit of a blur beyond Mum gettin' the truck. You two were the ones who told me I got the TARDIS's attention, remember? And that was hours later."

"You're right." The Doctor looked at Jack, then back to her. Jack saw curiosity, fear and perhaps the tiniest flicker of hope, wash across the Time Lord's face.

Rose began to speak again, but stopped as the lights in the console room flickered and strobed, making her headache throb in unison. "God, I feel rotten ... why are we talking about it, Doctor? What does it have to do with the TARDIS being sick?"

"Don't know. Maybe nothing."

"Then why's it important?"

"It just is, right? So ... humor me. Tell me everything you remember."

Rose felt momentarily rebellious. "Why not ask Jack? He said he could feel Her, too."

"I know, and maybe I've got questions for him," the Doctor said impatiently. "But this starts with you."

She looked at Jack, who raised an eyebrow, but also looked expectant. He nodded almost imperceptibly.

"Alright. Uhm ... I've no real memory of getting back, so there's a gap there, and then, let's see ... you and me, Doctor, we were alone in the control room. The Daleks were gone, and I think we must have talked a while, but then I ... think I felt sick, really badly nauseated, and my head hurt. You told me it was Vortex sickness, remember?" Rose shivered slightly, looked at the Doctor and hesitated. When she resumed, the look in her eyes was unmappable.

"I remember lying on the floor. That's when you came galloping into the control room, Jack; you looked – well, anyway, you came in. I remember that – and _you,_ Doctor, you looked like someone could have knocked you over with a feather. Uhm ... that's when I saw you walk over to Jack, kiss him, and then I was out like a light again. The next thing I know, I'm lyin' in the med bay, Jack's on the other bed and you're talking to him. The rest you know; you saw me wake up and told me about everything."

Jack licked his lips, and looked at the Doctor. "I think we could round it out a bit more for her, Doc."

"Don't – " The Time Lord stopped himself. All three of them knew that when Jack employed the disrespectful title, he was telling its recipient to Pay Attention, Damnit. "Right."

"Right, what?" The two of them looked at her, their eyes guilty, but neither spoke immediately.

Rose's temper snapped. "What? The TARDIS is falling apart around us, and you two are acting like kids caught stealing sweeties. We don't have time for this. _She_ doesn't have time for this! So – what haven't you told me?"

 _To be concluded.  
_


	2. Finding the Light

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The conclusion to my entry for the **betterwiththree** Live Journey community's OT3 Hurt Comfort Bingo ficathon. For those who are interested, this grew out of my drabble "Kiss to Build a Dream On" and follows that AU timeline. Many thanks to my beloved **dr_whuh** for his fine editing (and for not rolling his eyes at the metaphors.)  
>  **Disclaimer:** As much as I wish it were otherwise, Dr. Who and the characters of the Whoniverse are the property of their various creators. I own nothing; they own my heart.

"Tell her." Jack's voice was flat and commanding, a tone Rose couldn't remember hearing him take with the Doctor before.

To her surprise, the Doctor didn't object. Instead he moved, began pacing the console room again, speaking as he walked. "When we told you that you attracted Her attention, we didn't tell you how. You— " he shook his head slightly as he walked, then resumed. "You entered into some sort of psychic bond with Her. She listened to you when you asked Her to come back to the Station. Problem was, you listened to Her, too. And it almost killed you."

"But it saved me," Jack interjected.

"Almost too well," the Doctor said, heavily. The pacing slowed and he finally came to rest by the door; Rose wondered if he was contemplating escape, but his next words knocked most thought from her head. "Rose, Jack died fighting the Daleks. You brought him back, you and the TARDIS. Together, you almost took him out of Time."

The words hung there, and Rose saw everything in front her limned sharply, as if backlit from some vanishing point beyond her reach. "I ... what?"

 _Golden streaks in front of her eyes, becoming all she saw, becoming what she was—_

Jack walked over to her, knelt beside her and took both her hands. She could tell he wasn't certain how she'd respond. "Sweetheart, I was buying time for the Doctor; that was the plan all along. I got a direct hit from one of those tin-plated bastards. I knew I was dead before it fired. I felt myself die. And then I ... came back. Simple as that, except that you don't normally come back to life. It was like ... the sun in my head, gold and lead in my veins, like every orgasm I'd ever had, like the worst pain I'd ever experienced."

"I didn't do that," she said faintly. She wasn't going to believe something like that, that was crazy—

 _I bring life_

She blinked, shivered, again tried to catch the unexpected vision before it faded but failed.

"You did, sweetheart, believe me, and I am grateful for every day you've given me since then," Jack continued, his voice low and intent. "But you're right, it wasn't just you. It was you and the TARDIS together."

"You called yourselves Bad Wolf," the Doctor said. "The words we'd been seein', hearin' everywhere."

 _I create myself_

She gave a soft little cry of recognition and loss, her headache briefly forgotten. "Oh."

Jack stayed silent, but squeezed her hand, hard, while she wept. She didn't know the Doctor had returned to her side until she felt him take her other hand. Without opening her eyes, she pulled her hands away from theirs. "You had no right to keep this from me."

"Rose— " the Doctor started, but she didn't let him finish.

"No, there's no excuse. You had no right," she said, suddenly so filled with rage she thought she might not be able to say anything more. "I deserved better from you."

"Sweetheart—"

"—and from you," she said, rounding on Jack as he tried to speak. "You knew this? And you didn't tell me?" The sense of betrayal made her dizzy, sicker than the headache had. "I thought we were a team, that we were more than that." Her voice trembled. "Thought that meant we trusted each other with ... with important things. Guess I was wrong. Or didn't you think this was important? Or maybe you thought I was too stupid to explain it to?"

Jack opened his mouth, then shut it with a quickness. He looked over Rose's head at the Doctor, but the Gallifreyan, too, seemed to be at a loss.

The TARDIS started an off-key whine, painful and not quite high enough to ignore, while the three of them — Time Lord, rogue captain and shop-girl adventurer — waited for someone to break the silence.

"You're right. We kept something from you, and we shouldn't have," the Doctor said. Jack was so astonished at the apology that he had trouble keeping his face impassive. "Seems like the universe agrees with you, not us. Now we've got to sort it.”

His next words were equally matter of fact, but apology had given way to an openness he rarely showed anyone, even Rose or Jack.

“We _are_ a team, Rose Tyler. We're more than that, we’re ... we’re more than that," the Doctor faltered momentarily, but continued. "Don’t talk about it much, I know — I can’t, me — but we three, we’re each other’s responsibility now, aren’t we, we're each other's ... we belong— " He stopped, started again. "So will you listen? Listen, and let us explain."

 

She didn't answer, but she didn’t bolt, which Jack knew she’d been on the brink of doing.

He deliberately took her hand again. “We made a mistake, Rose. It was wrong of us not to tell you. But it seemed so huge, so strange ... how could I even begin to tell you, when I couldn't grasp it myself? I'd been dead, and ... well that's it, Rose; I'd been dead."

She tried to ignore the barely controlled tension and dismay in Jack's voice as he said that, didn’t want to hear it any more than she’d wanted to hear the naked vulnerability in the Doctor’s voice.

"Jack's right," the Doctor agreed. "I had no idea what to tell you. In all the time I've been with the TARDIS, She'd never done anything like this before. And you shouldn't have survived it, taking in the heart of the TARDIS —"

"What, you mean like Blon?" She finally looked up at him and then at Jack; found herself forced to decide between fury and affection. Love forged a truce with anger, then banished it. The three of them were each other’s responsibility, after all. Her. The Doctor. Jack. "I was like Blon?"

"More than that, Rose," the Doctor said. "As far from that as you can imagine. You were—" Rose was astonished to see something like awe in his expression "—you saw all of Time for a little while. Like a Time Lord. No human's supposed to do that. You're not built for it, but with the TARDIS in your head, you were ... more than a Time Lord. Something else entirely. You _manipulated_ Time."

Rose shook her head again, hating the sound in his voice. "You can do that."

"No," he said firmly. "I'm able to do some things. Time Lords were always able to do some things, because we understood Time, because we could see it. But only a little. Only fits and starts, and not nearly as well as we liked to think.

"You — for a little bit, just a bit, mind, with the TARDIS in your heart, you _were_ Time."

"You destroyed the Daleks, Rose," Jack said softly, his tone now uncomfortably close to reverence. "The Doctor told me. With just a wave of your hand."

 _I see your atoms and I divide them_

Rose whimpered, but she reached for the image of golden ships falling to dust, eager to remember more. Tears blurred her sight. "I — we — She and I, together ... we —

 _want you safe —_

" — our Doctor," she whispered, fighting the urge to recoil from the bliss and pain of the TARDIS' embrace. The headache spiraled into agony again. "Oh, god ... my head, it's killin' me."

"That's what you said before," the Doctor said, his eyes as wide as they had been then, she remembered. She turned her face to him, unwilling to let him out of her sight.

"I was dying," she said. She wasn't asking, now.

He gestured helplessly. "It was the Vortex."

"No."

He blinked.

"It was Her — Doctor, I know she didn't mean to, I know —" she said quickly, both to assuage the hurt she saw in his face, and because she somehow knew, absolutely, that it was true. "But She forgot I was human."

Rose felt light, better than she had in days despite the the red haze of pain. If someone had asked her to explain it, she might have said it felt as if there were pieces of her which had been lost, and that had been returned to her just as she realized their loss. And perhaps those pieces were re-balancing; her cells, her heart, her DNA, her soul. Perhaps all that had been needed to make her whole was someone granting her the justice of memory.

But the joy of recovering one's past can only finesse pain temporarily, especially of the sort that now held her in its grip. Rose lost track of what she meant to say as white hot stars flared in her head. She cried out, and toppled from the jump seat, arms wrapped around herself in a useless attempt to stop the torment.

"Rose!"

Four hands caught her, four arms cradled her before she hit the console floor grill, and two pairs of blue eyes went wide with fear. Jack couldn't breathe for a moment, and the Doctor felt time slow down in a way only Time Lords could suffer.

"Doctor?"

"I don't know ... Jack, help me get her up, into the med bay."

Before Jack could respond, Rose pulled her arms from around her head and forced herself to open her eyes. For a long moment, she worked to speak past the pain. She succeeded. "Not me. Her."

"What?" Jack wanted to be certain he understood the barely audible words.

"She cares for us," Rose whispered. "We've gotta care for Her."

"Rose, you're ... you just collapsed—"

"But She's dying." She seemed to gain strength, having got that out. "And— listen Doctor, listen, this is important — I've ... I've had this headache ... so has Jack—" She stopped, swallowed, started again. "You want to help me, help me and Jack ... help Her. You just told me we were connected. I think we still are."

"That's—" Once again, the Doctor stopped himself.

It was possible.

That he hadn't felt what Jack and Rose were feeling meant nothing. Time Lords trained obsessively for years to keep their innermost thoughts from the prying of others. Long before he'd ever run from Gallifrey, long before he'd ever thought of throwing down the gauntlet, he'd been forced through the rigorous disciplines that conditioned him to throw up telepathic walls — strong to begin with, stronger still after years of practice taking him from long-forgotten childhood to equally distant majority, and almost insurmountable now with the passage of years.

He was always able to reach for the TARDIS when he wanted, and She (when She cared to reach him) usually announced Herself and won immediate entry. But if She had been sick, his own damnably Pavlovian self-defense mechanisms could have shunted away Her cries. He thought about his unexpected sleep cycles and the half remembered dreams, and he cursed silently. Of course he'd kept himself safe. Of course, and of course those he cared about most were suffering as a result.

The room light flickered, and the Doctor wondered if that was the TARDIS trying to speak to him.

"Doctor, the med bay?" Jack interrupted his thoughts. "If she's right, and the two of us are being affected by whatever the hell's got the TARDIS in its grip, maybe we shouldn't assume I'll be fine for much longer, and I really think we need to move Rose."

"No you don't," Rose said faintly. "Can walk."

"Not likely, sweetheart. Shall we do this, fearless leader?"

Jack's delivery was ruined by his strained tone. The Doctor looked at him closely and was alarmed to see sweat on his forehead and white lines around his mouth.

"Headache, like she said?"

"For days now. It's been getting worse."

"Define worse."

"Trying to decide whether to throw up or pull my own eyes out."

"How long's it been that bad?"

Jack's shrug was careful. "The past few minutes have been killer."

"Right. Headaches. For days. And getting worse, along with the TARDIS. Not like you lot would think to tell me," he growled. "Bloody apes."

Neither Rose nor Jack objected to the comment, which didn't make the Doctor feel any better. "Come on then, Jack; fireman's carry. Rose, lean on Jack's shoulder ... there you go. Careful ... take it easy, Captain, we'll get there soon enough."

He tried not to think about the missing rooms and the walled up doors. The three of them would make it the med bay, no problem at all, he thought to himself, repeating the sentence until it became a silent prayer.

 

*******************

He watched them as they slept.

He should have been working with the data he'd collected over the past hour. He should have been looking at readouts from the screwdriver— he didn't trust anything his poor, precise ship told him now — and he should have been searching in the data for patterns, for answers and solutions.

Instead, after he had checked out Jack and Rose, had monitored their vital signs and fed them painkillers, and distracted them with grumbles and sarcasm and the misdirection of manic smiles and jokes, he had told them to go to bed. He needed them rested, he had told them. He needed their help, and they were useless if they were weary and in pain.

He had walked with them to a bedroom, giving silent thanks to something that a bedroom was still there. He had pulled Jack's boots off, and Rose's trainers; had gently chivvied them out of jeans and trousers, scolded them into bed, and turned the lights low. They had let him, because of the pain, and the painkillers, and weariness, and because they trusted him.

And now he watched them as they slept and paid no attention whatsoever to the data he had gathered. Not now, not just yet.

Because, ultimately, he was fairly certain he knew what he would do when they awakened.

He'd known it from the moment Rose had unwittingly given him the hint — or at least something in him had recognized it, even if his large and apparently useless Time Lord brain hadn't immediately caught on. It was why her comment had frozen him with fear, and why, paradoxically, his fear had been tinged with something akin to elation.

If Jack and Rose could feel the TARDIS, the TARDIS could affect them. But it was possible, just possible, that the road could be traveled in both directions.

 

************************

 

"It's not real telepathy," the Doctor said. "I'm not going to be communicating with you, so much as using your minds as a conduit. You can feel Her, which means there should be neural pathways She's burned into your minds. I can ... well, it's enough to say that I can use those pathways to get to Her. That's the plan, at any rate."

Jack nodded, but looked wary. "I'm assuming you can get past my Agency conditioning against telepathic interference."

"Like I said, this isn't telepathy, not the kind your Agency lab coat types were thinking of," the Time Lord said dismissively. Then he softened. "I'm going to be careful. Not going to put you at any more risk than I absolutely have to."

Rose looked wan and tired, but she also looked happier than she had for some time. "So ... what do you want us to do?"

They were back in the med lab. The Doctor had briefly considering moving the operation to the console room, closer to Her heart, but he abandoned the idea in favor of having quick access to tools he might need if Jack or Rose responded badly to his mental meddling.

And it was meddling, despite his assurances. He suspected Jack knew that; the Captain was too familiar with psionics not to be, even if it was the sketchy psionics which Agency types congratulated themselves on controlling.

Rose, though, was blessedly unfamiliar with telepathy, which meant she'd trust him. That trust was, he hoped, going to allow him to move through her mind without encountering the kind of baffles he might have to dance around in Jack's mind.

"I'm going to relax both of you, put you both in a very light trance— Captain, will your conditioning allow for that?"

Jack nodded.

"Good. Once you're both relaxed, I'll take a preliminary look at the lay of the land inside your heads. Next step will be to identify the pathways She appears to have used to link with you. Once I have a grasp of them, I'll decide which of you might, let's say, give me best route to get back to Her." The Doctor thought of how easy it would have been to explain this if he'd been able to speak Gallifreyan to them. If he'd been talking to a pair of Time Lords. But Rose and Jack were humans, and he was reduced to speaking in metaphor.

"What equipment are you going to use?" Rose asked.

He held up his two hands. "These. I just need to touch your temples, to establish the link."

"Like Mr. Spock." She didn't quite grin.

"Oh, for the love of— Spock? Again?" He rolled his eyes theatrically, but he was grateful for the not-quite grin. "Alright, you two. Sit down here." He gestured to the two examination tables he'd wrestled about until their heads were close to each other, their feet further apart. He'd raised the backs until they were a bad imitation of chaises longues, and placed a chair in the v-shaped space between, where he could sit facing the other two. "Get comfy. Now, hold hands. That'll make it easier for me to access both of you."

"Are you absolutely sure you need both of us?" That made three times Jack had asked. "I'm comfortable with telepathy, and Rose wouldn't have to go through something she's not used to."

"I can do this!" she protested. "Doctor, I can do this."

The Doctor grimaced. "Not sure of anything, me. I'll be up front with you on that, for a change." Their answering smiles were more proof that honesty had its good points. "But everything that happened on the Game Station points to a link between the two of you, as well as between you and the TARDIS. So I'm going to work with the assumption that I'll need both of you. " His wistful thoughts about other links were ruthlessly shunted aside.

His companions made themselves as comfortable as they could. Rose reached for Jack's hand. "Ready as I'll ever be, Doctor. Besides, it's for Her. You ready, Jack?"

He smiled at her, then turned to the Doctor. "Like she said. It's for Her."

The Time Lord looked from one to the other, humbled by what he saw in their eyes. "Right. Let's start, shall we?"

 

****************************

 

His eyes closed, his fingers stroked two temples.

Jack's skin was tight and dry, carrying hints and echoes of sunburn and frostbite from unknown worlds, unseen and well-healed scars. Under his other hand, Rose felt soft, her skin full and flexible with the luxury of youth, slightly moist with the fever sweat that even his ministrations hadn't dispelled completely. His fingertips tingled, and he engaged his mind, throwing the necessary switches in his own head.

He waited, let his senses reach out and push against their minds just as his finger might skate across the surface tension of a water drop or, in Jack's case, across a flow of mercury. A tiny push with Rose and the water surrounded him, as clear and welcoming as a sun-warmed pool; a slender edge of psionic pressure, and Jack's quicksilver flowed and clung to his awareness as if it searched for something to hold it together.

As his sense of them deepened, their parallel breathing patterns settled, slowed, twined round him in a complementary and recurrent suspiration. He smelled the glorious and unmistakable earth and acid of human breath, laced with Rose's mint toothpaste and the sweetly bitter almond of Jack's 51st century metabolism.

Had they been Gallifreyan, his inner vision might have "seen" the mathematically byzantine beauty of minds like his. But he ignored that path, choosing instead the "vision" of human dreams. Less intricately awesome, or gracefully calligraphic, perhaps, but simple, immediate and kinetically powerful.

He matched his breathing to theirs, and he went in to them.

He was flying. Sparks and shadows below him resolved into a road, then two, then three and four, then more and more, branching and re-branching, curving around, one road meeting another and flowing into yet another before splitting off again.

Each road pulsed with light. A scant majority rippled deep crimson and indigo, shifting forest green, glints of amber and bronze. But across and around them, encircling, joining and jumping away at unexpected points were pathways that blazed like lemon suns, molten glory dancing with flickering scarlet and emerald streamers, incandescent gentian and fuschia.

He knew them, and watched them grow.

Yggdrasil, Etz haChayim bearing the Sephiroth, acacia, phoenix and dragon lighting each branch .... he followed the roads, soaring away and toward, gaining and losing perspective as he felt each path, knew each hue.

Follow the indigo and bronze, find where they chase and dance with the gentians and the lemon yellows ... up he went, and back he came, drawn to those paths as they became roads, then flowed together as rivers, blending their lights, nothing lost or subsumed, nothing doused or drowned or muddied, but enhanced and glorified—

Blue. And Gold.

He followed their flow and he found Her.

And he came to Her, close for the first time since realizing Her travail.

He was so close—

And She would not open to him.

She could not.

He saw the barricades. He saw the way they blocked entry, and the way they pierced Her, so that they seemed to grow from Her as they isolated Her. Precision indeed, obscene illusions of Her self, monstrous things. He could not pass them, could not remove them, and Her silence screamed at him.

 

***************************

 

The Doctor's eyes flew open in shock and dismay. He barely kept his fingers to Jack's and Rose's temples. So close!

In front of him Jack's eyes fluttered, but didn't open. Rose's eyes were open, deep brown and unseeing. They were still in trance.

His hearts pounded until he convinced himself to calm down.

It was for Her, they had said. They were giving themselves to allow him their access to Her. So that he could find the problem, and cure Her pain.

They loved Her.

What did he have to give Her?

Something ... he caught at it unsuccessfully. Not out here; he had to go back in, and he would find it. Patience, patience ....

He closed his eyes.

 

****************************

 

The roads and branches lay below him; somewhere within their tracery, he would find the fleeting knowledge that had almost come to him in the outside world.

He looked at the riot of growing, living light. And then he saw what he had missed before.

All the roads, all the limbs and branches started in one place. But there at their generative point, where he understood everything should have been invested with energy, where everything should have been most intense, he found the opposite. The colors dimmed, and the roads dwindled, shrank and twisted into the trunk of a starved and thirsty tree. The light was failing, the colors fading. The tree needed nourishment.

He knew now, knew his mistake.

How had he thought he could fly above it all?

He stilled, furled wings that he had not realized he had. He fell.

He willed himself to accept hitting the unseen ground, bequeathed his body to it, gave himself to the withered roots of the tree, became the roots and fed them.

And to his bewildered joy, he was not consumed. Instead, he became more.

Just as he had watched the slender branches of two bright and fragile human consciousnesses merge without losing themselves, his ancient essence merged with, and was in turn nourished by them.

Root to tree, limb to branch to road to river to ocean, and all surging toward Her, a tide of love.

She saw each of them. She saw them together, separate and fused in a connection that shorted out the damage, bypassed all the disastrously imposed blueprints of Her foolish admirers, dissolved them and set Her free, let Her feel again, not merely operate.

The light blazed about him and he was not alone.

This time, when he opened his eyes, Jack and Rose were awake, brown and blue eyes swimming with tears that matched his own. Around them, the TARDIS thrummed and beat like a heart, and it sounded like a song.

 

***********************

 

"It was _those_ people? In _that_ place?" Rose was indignant.

"They thought they were helping," the Doctor said, looking up at her from where his head rested in her lap. He was weary, but still filled with near luminous jubilation. He couldn't be angry at anything, not with his ship humming in his mind again, not with the bright branches of the tree still shimmering and resonating there as well. He tried not to hope too hard, or analyze the hope. "They thought we had abandoned Her because she was defective, or sick— nothin' that alive is ever physically out of touch with their kind, so if we'd left Her, they needed to ... well, hard to explain the way they thought. She showed me, and even I had trouble figurin' it out."

"Tell you what, Doctor, let's never ever go back there. Even if they meant well," she said, unwilling to forgive as quickly as he had. "Don't know how long it'll take Her to regrow gardens and rooms, or feel a hundred percent like Herself again.

"Regular avenging angel, aren't you?" Jack cradled Rose's head on his shoulder, his arm around her. "I'm just glad that She's feeling better. Not to mention you and me. I love Her, but she almost killed you, and was was making a go at me, too. Now that all Her little friends' jury-rigged algorithms are a thing of the past, and She's not reduced to screaming for help by being The Best Spaceship Ever instead of Herself— " he stopped and shuddered at the thought of what She must have been through, then shifted on the couch and laughed. "Move your large and lanky self, Doctor; my arm's going numb, and I want my pillow back."

"When did I become a sofa pillow?" Rose asked without heat. "Maybe I want my lap for myself. Good thing I put up with the two of you." Then she smiled. "Or the three of you." In her mind she heard the echo of Her approval.

Despite his words, Jack made no effort to change position. The three of them, human and Gallifreyan, rested together. Around them, the TARDIS breathed and lived.

Rose broke the comfortable silence, looking into the flames flickering on the library hearth as she spoke again.

"Thank you both for telling me the truth, about me and Game Station, and Her. If you hadn't done that, maybe we wouldn't have been able to save Her. There's a lot more I want to ask, although it scares me witless, but ... thank you."

"It was a long time coming, sweetheart." Jack planted a kiss on her forehead, reached for the Doctor's hand. The Doctor gave it to him; Jack thought he heard a trill of music, and grinned before closing his eyes.

"We've got a lot of time," the Doctor said. "We'll figure it all out together, us." And then, so faintly the others almost missed it. "Together's good."

They fell asleep as the fire sank to coals on the hearth. The TARDIS kept vigil until morning came.

 

-30-


End file.
